1. THE POLITICS OF PHYSICALISM There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. — William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V This book needs to be written. This story needs to be told. It is a story of corruption and abuse of power, of scientific ridicule and academic prejudice, of how the people we have trusted to give us accurate knowledge have betrayed that trust and blocked large segments of knowledge from our view. When we wake up and recognize it, this corruption will be seen to be as serious as the corruption in the Catholic Church that precipitated the Protestant Reformation or the corruption in the French government that brought on the Revolution. This corruption has not compromised too much the accuracy of scientists working in their fields of expertise, but its effect on the culture at large has been profound and crippling. Science has brought us up out of the Dark Ages, and now the scientific establishment has brought our culture back down into something like another Dark Ages. This scientific establishment has become something like an authoritarian priesthood with a rigid belief in a purely physical universe, a belief …